Ask GadgetGuy: would Apple really kill the headphone jack?

There’s a neat rumour going around suggesting Apple will finally kill the iPhone headphone jack in the iPhone 7. Is there any truth to this, and what happens if Apple does kill the jack?

Now that our lives revolve around what we do online, our devices are getting bigger to match. We need large displays so we can surf the web and see as much as possible, and tweet, and share photos, and engage that whole social network side of things, and carry as much of the web with us at all times.

Our phones are our window to the world, and it is hyper important that we see as much as possible of this all the time.

But while the screen gets bigger, our desire to have the thinnest and lightest gadget also increases, because we don’t want to be carrying around a tablet when we don’t need to.

Because of this, hardware makers have needed to focus their efforts, coming up with the best designs possible that deliver best in class large displays without forcing us to lug around what basically constitutes a laptop in our pants, albeit a pocket-sized laptop at that.

As such, they’ve made the screens bigger and the hardware thinner, with smaller components, spread out batteries, and designs that work in the hand.

And yet, it’s still not enough.

We want devices thinner, lighter, and more indicative of the future. We want our phones to be super slim and comfortable in the pocket, and we want them made so well that when you eventually drop them, they bounce and survive, instead of shatter and turn to crystalline shards of sadness and despair.

We want our phones to be so much, and so hardware makers need to redouble those efforts one more time in an effort to win over your dollars.

Thickness is the hardest one to deal with at the moment, because now that we’ve found the right area for a medium to large phone — with medium phones occupying the 4.7 to 5.2 inch space, and large phones running from 5.5 to 6 inches — and now that display technology has increased to be as good as the physical books and magazines you peruse through at the checkout, the focus is on size and weight.

In general, it comes down to this simple question: how do you get a phone to be thinner than what it is?

Take a look at a 2015 flagship and you’ll find a general thickness of around 7mm, with the iPhone 6S set at 7.1mm, Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge hitting 7mm, and Sony’s Xperia Z5 fetching 7.3mm.